Networks and Boundaries

The study of the visual arts can and does cross cultural, civilizational, ethnic, religious, and geographic boundaries. Cultural exchange takes place through kaleidescopic networks that are themselves dynamic and transformative. These exchanges are integral to the construction of boundaries, contributing to definitions of self and other. The contact zones within which they occur are marked by appropriations, hybridizations, and syncretismsall of which remap cultural boundaries. The study of the visual arts has its own networks and boundaries, including interdisciplinarity and divisions between national, area, and world histories. How freely have artists, art objects, and artistic concepts and practices moved across socio-political and cultural boundaries? And with what results? How closely do artistic crossings and their analyses map onto larger networks of power and economics? How do we negotiate the different demands of local cultural contexts with larger regional and/or global concerns?

The Getty Research Institute welcomes applications from researchers in the arts, humanities, and social sciences who wish to be in residence at the Institute in 20082009 and whose projects explore cross-cultural exchange and the visual arts. Scholars in residence will find that the special collections of the Research Library are especially rich in primary materials that bear upon this topic, ranging from nineteenth-century photographs by European travelers in Asia to the collection of the Association Connaissance de l'histoire de l'Afrique contemporaine (exploring the influence of French colonialism in Africa); from the papers of international architect Bernard Rudofsky to documentation of such global activities as Fluxus and mail art.

Getty Scholars

Ali Behdad (Consortium Scholar) is Professor and Chair of the Department of Comparative Literature at University of California Los Angeles. He specializes in Postcolonial literature and theory, European representations of the Middle East, the Victorian novel and travel Literature, and nineteenth-century photography of/in the Middle East. Contact Visions: On Photography and Modernity in the Middle East
(September–June)

Anthony Cokes is Professor at Brown University, Department of Modern Culture and Media. He is a post-conceptualist artist whose practice foregrounds social critique. Networks: Electronica in Global, Virtual Context
(September–March)

Thierry de Duve is Professor at Université Lille 3, Département Arts Plastiques in Villeneuve d'Ascq, France. He specializes in modern and contemporary art theory and aesthetics in the modern era. On Art and its Boundaries
(September–June)

Rob Linrothe is Associate Professor of Art History at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York. He is a specialist in the Buddhist art of the Himalayas with a focus on the pre-modern mural painting of northwest India and the contemporary revival of monastic painting in Amdo (China, eastern cultural Tibet). Cultural Flows Across Asia: Esoteric Buddhist Representation and Transformation
(September–June)

John Onians is Emeritus Professor of World Art Studies at the University of East Anglia. Art as a Worldwide Phenomenon and the Networks and Boundaries in the Brain That Cause its Similarities and Differences from Prehistory to the Present
(December–June)

Nabila Oulebsir is Maître de conférences en histoire de l'art contemporain (histoire du patrimoine et de l'architecture) à l'Université de Poitiers. She specializes in German, French, and North African architecture and monuments, focusing on patrimony, colonial politics, and the construction of knowledge and artistic disciplines. Scientific Networks and Boundaries between Disciplines: Art History from Johann Joachim Winckelmann to Jean Alazard (Germany/France/North Africa)
(September–June)

Mary Louise Roberts is the John Schaeffer Associate Professor in British Art, Department of Art History and Theory, University of Sydney. A specialist in nineteenth-century British art, she focuses on gender and Orientalism, Ottoman art, and European cultural exchange. Artistic Exchanges in Nineteenth-Century Istanbul
(September–June)

Andrew Schulz is Associate Professor, Department of Art History at the University of Oregon. He specializes in the art of Spain and the Spanish world from 1500 to the early twentieth century. Al-Andalus in the Age of Enlightenment: Islamic Art and Culture in the Spanish Imagination, 1750–1820
(January–June)

Visiting Scholars

Sussan Babaie is an independent scholar. She specializes in urbanism and visual culture of the early modern Persianate world and, in particular, Safavid (1501–1722) Iran. Metropolitan Meanings: Social Identity, International Commerce, and the Houses of Isfahan in the Seventeenth Century
(September–March)

Jean-Louis Cohen is the Sheldon H. Solow Professor in the History of Architecture at New York University, Institute of Fine Arts. He specializes in nineteenth- and twentieth-century architecture and urbanism in Germany, France, Italy, Russia and North America. France and Germany: Architectural Interaction at the Boundary and Beyond
(April–June)

Okwui Enwezor is Dean of Academic Affairs and Senior Vice President at the San Francisco Art Institute. He specializes in postcolonial transitions, African modernity, and contemporary African photography.
(April–June)

Claire Frances Fox is Associate Professor of English and International Studies, University of Iowa. She specializes in inter-American cultural studies, Mexican and U.S.–Mexican border arts and culture, visual culture studies, and cultural policy studies. Creating the Hemispheric Citizen: The OAS, Cultural Policy, and the Visual Arts (1945–1968)
(January–March)

Ursula Frohne is Professor of Art History at the Kunsthistorisches Institut, Universität zu Köln. She specializes in nineteenth to twenty-first century art, museum and exhibition history, and the history and sociology of the artist. Trajectories of Communication Aesthetics and Network Structures from the 1960s to the Present
(September–December)

Kenneth Gonzales-Day is Professor and Chair, Art Department at Scripps College in Claremont, California. He is a writer and artist specializing in photography.
Reading Photographs, Making Photographs: Responding to the Getty Collection
(September–December)

Germain Loumpet is Senior Lecturer, Department of Art and Archaeology, Faculty of Arts, Letters & Social Sciences at University of Yaounde I (Cameroon). He specializes in African pre-history, particularly the archaeology and visual culture of the kingdom of Bamun in western Cameroon. Frontier of African Art: Objects, Identities and Cultural Networks in Cameroon in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries
(September–February)

Jennifer Purtle is Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto, Department of Art History and East Asian Studies. She specializes in Chinese art and visual culture from the Six Dynasties to the present, in particular the cultural geography of artistic production, urbanism, East/West exchange, and optical media. Forms of Cosmopolitanism in the Sino-Mongol City
(April–June)

Avinoam Shalem is Max Planck Fellow at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence and Professor of Islamic art at the Institut für Kunstgeschichte der Universität München. He specializes in Islamic minor arts, the secular and sacred contexts of artifacts, and the interactions between Medieval Islamic artistic worlds and European Jewish and Christian communities.
(January–March)

Predoctoral Fellows

Carolin Behrmann is a PhD candidate in the Kunstgeschichtliches Seminar, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Tyrant and Martyr: On the Normativity of the Image in the Context of Cultural Expansion (1540–1644)
(September–June)

Alessia Frassani is a PhD candidate in the Art History Program, Graduate Center, City University of New York. At the Crossroads of Empire. Mixtecs and Spanish Art in Colonial Yanhuitlan, Oaxaca
(September–June)

Courtney Martin is a PhD candidate in Art History at Yale University. Cyclones in the Metropole: British Artists 1976–1989
(September–June)

Postdoctoral Fellows

Esra Akcan received her PhD from Columbia University. She is Assistant Professor in the Department of Art History at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She specializes in contemporary Turkish architecture and early twentieth-century German-Turkish exchanges. Modernity in Translation: Geopolitical Interactions in Residential Culture
(September–June)

Hannah Feldman earned a PhD from the Columbia University Department of Art History and Archaeology. She is Assistant Professor in the Department of Art History at Northwestern University. Her research focuses on the relationship between urban space and the arts of opposition, especially as they engage the geo-political consequences of war, nationalism, and displacement in the post- and neocolonial world. The Art of Decolonization: Representation and the Public in Paris During the Algerian War
(September–June)

Talinn Grigor received her PhD from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is Assistant Professor, Department of Fine Arts at Brandeis University in greater Boston. She specializes in relations between architecture and political discourse, particularly issues of national patrimony and taste in modern day Iran, as well as European art historiography and its connections to the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century eclecticism of Qajar architecture. Of Mimetic Authenticity: The Orient or Rome Debate beyond (post)Colonial Ambivalence
(September–June)

Guest Scholars

Kornelia von Berswordt-Wallrabe is Director of the Staatliches Museum Schwerin in Germany. While in residence she will be researching the first journey abroad of the young Marcel Duchamp to Munich in 1912.
(April–June)

Arnauld Brejon is the Directeur des collections, Mobilier national, Paris. At the GRI he will be working on his manuscript on the tapestries of Louis XIV.
(January)

Hartmut Dorgerloh is Generaldirektor at Stiftung Preußische Schlösser und Gärten Berlin-Brandenburg in Germany. He specializes in Prussian gardens and residences as well as the history of the Museumsinsel in Berlin.
(January)

Daniela Gallo is Professeur d'histoire de l'art moderne at Université Pierre-Mendès-France in Grenoble. She specializes in neo-classical European sculpture, the eighteenth-century art market in Rome, and the history of the Museo Pio Clementino.
(April–June)

Jacqueline Lichtenstein is a Professor of the Philosophy of Art at the Université Paris IV-Sorbonne. She specializes in color theory, the dialectic between rhetoric and painting, and most recently in the complex relationships between European painting and sculpture.
(February–March)

Christian Michel is Professor of Art History at the Université de Lausanne. He specializes in the conditions of artistic production in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe.
(January–June)

Edward Nygren is the former Director of Smith College Museum of Art and of the Art Collections at The Huntington Library. Dr. Nygren will be doing research in the GRI collections on the letters of James Ward, R. A. (1769–1859).
(October–December)

Peter-Klaus Schuster is General Director of State Museums of Berlin. He specializes in German art of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
(January–June)

Research Fellows

Agnès Penot-Lejeune is a PhD candidate at the Université Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne. Her dissertation research focuses on the internationalization of French art galleries at the end of the nineteenth century through the examples of Goupil and Boussod & Valadon. At the GRI she will work closely with the Project for the Study of Collecting and Provenance.
(July–June)

Boris Hars-Tschachotin is a PhD candidate in the History of Art at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. His dissertation examines the role of the art director in shaping film aesthetics, particularly through the process of drawing. At the GRI he will be looking at collections pertaining to expressionist theater and set design – with special attention to Piranesi’s Carceri series.
(November–January)

Museum Guest Scholars

Szilvia Bodnár is Curator of Prints and Drawings and Head of Department at the Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest, Hungary.
(October–December)

Asok Kumar Das is an independent scholar based in West Bengal, India.
(October–December)

Melanie Holcomb is Associate Curator in the department of Medieval Art and The Cloisters at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
(July–September)

Todd Longstaffe-Gowan is an independent landscape architect and historian based in London, England.
(January–March)

Sylvie Penichon is Conservator of Photographs at the Amon Carter Museum of Art in Fort Worth, Texas.
(July–September)

Sarah Schultz is Director of Education and Community Programs at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
(January–March)

Bodo von Dewitz is Senior Chief Curator of the photographic collections at the Museum Ludwig in Cologne, Germany.
(October–December)